Biblical Church by Beresford Job has become one of my favorite books and is highly recommended. This is the second excerpt from the book. The excerpt is a bit longer than my usual posts but I hope you take the time to read it. You can read the first excerpt here.
No! This is not about ‘perfect’ churches. It is rather about something as attainable as any other aspect of obedience to scripture, and that is bringing biblical churches into being.
But neither is it about advocating churches without problems. That would be as ridiculous as any notion of having ‘perfect’ ones. In a sinful world, and given that churches both exist in that world and are precisely comprised of redeemed sinners, problems are actually one of the things you can positively count on. So no, it’s not about being problem-free either! In fact, as someone who has practised church life as advocated in this book for three decades, the author can testify with some conviction that, as part of such a church, you will very possibly have more problems than you would in an unbiblical one. Yet what you can be assured of is that you will at least then be experiencing the problems you are meant to have, and which result from being true to scripture, rather than, as with unbiblical churches, having to give such considerable time and effort to dealing with problems and difficulties that arise precisely because of not being biblical; problems and difficulties which are, therefore, actually entirely unnecessary and completely avoidable. Just imagine never again having to give the slightest thought, or money, to buildings and infra-structure. Consider never having to give time or effort to the process of choosing your next Minister or Pastor, or giving thought to how much the church is going to have to pay him. Revel with me in the sheer delight and freedom of not having to bother with keeping up with what the ‘big cheeses’ higher up the church hierarchy are getting up to, or what they are expecting of you. Savour too the joy of being able to put family life first, and of being part of a church setup which positively encourages and enables the families in it to do just that.
The problems which do emerge though, and emerge they will, are those of significant ongoing relationships. How we love and serve one another, and how we grow in the Lord together! But of course those are the precisely the problems we are meant to have. They are the ones which sanctify us, which bring us into that ‘death to self’ we so desperately need to experience. They bring us to our knees, and therefore more and more in line with the teaching of scripture, and the knowledge and experience of Jesus living his life in and through us. It is hard; yes! And sometimes it is harder than you think you are able to bear; but it is life! It is real life and it is real discipleship! Through it we are able to share the sufferings of Jesus, become like him in His death and resurrection and, as a result, grow in grace, love and truth.
There is another misapprehension that needs to be addressed here, and it is any idea that I am contending that if only we get church structure right, if only we set up churches which function and operate according to the blueprint found in the New Testament, then all will be well. However, not only am I not contending that, I do not in any way believe it to be the case. It is perfectly possible for a group of believers to get together and form a church which observes the structure this book outlines down to the smallest detail. They could meet in absolute accordance with the format I am arguing for and they could go through the checklist and tick every box in my ‘irreducible minimum’ chapter, and then some. Yet they could nevertheless be cold, unloving, and virtually without anything of the grace and power of the Lord amongst them. Indeed, they could constitute quite the most unpleasant church on the face of the earth.
The issue, ultimately, is not that of just getting structure and format right at all. It is much deeper and far more profound than that. It is understanding that the structure and format is only as it is in scripture in order to enable and encourage something else entirely; the sharing of the life of Jesus together. Although the Lord used the picture in a slightly different context, we are nevertheless talking about the difference between wine and wineskins. It is not the wineskin which ultimately matters, but the wine which it contains. Yet if the wineskin is not the right sort, then as Jesus taught, the wine will escape and you are left with nothing but an empty wineskin. And whereas it is certainly the case that you could have a wineskin of the right shape and size, but with little or no actual wine in it, representing a spiritually dead and, therefore, useless and unpleasant biblical church; nevertheless, having an unbiblical church which is alive in the Lord though obviously much better than having a dead biblical one is still an ultimate compromise because it can just never fully experience what the Lord wants for it; or rather, for those individual believers who together comprise it. Precisely because it is an ultimately passive experience for the vast majority of believers in it, an unbiblical church can never fully hold the wine of the life of Jesus in the way an alive, biblical one can. The wine is what really matters and not the wineskin. Absolutely! Yet if the wineskin is wrong, then our experience of the wine will always be severely compromised and limited.
Think of it like hands and gloves. If we liken a church to a glove, then Jesus is the hand that goes inside it. Without the hand inside it is, of course, a dead thing; but when the hand is in it there is both life and movement. The glove then truly becomes that which the hand is lives and moves through. The issue then arises concerning the design of the glove. What, exactly, should it look like? What shape should it be? And of course the answer is that it should be the appropriate and correct shape for a hand to fit into it. The more correct and appropriate the shape of the glove, the more freedom of movement afforded to the hand inside the glove.
Unbiblical churches, because they are not based on the design and blueprint found in the New Testament, are like a glove that has, for example, two fingers and one thumb. Or maybe eight fingers and three thumbs. Whereas the hand can get in the glove, nevertheless, because the glove is the wrong shape for the hand to fit into properly, the movement of the hand inside the glove is compromised in varying and major ways. The life coming from the hand is truly there, but heavily restricted in what it can do.
As So what about biblical churches in this regard then? Well, what we can say with absolute certainly is that they are, at the very least, the right ‘shape’. They are the perfect design for the life that wants to fit inside them. Remaining with our picture we can say that they do indeed have the requisite four fingers and one thumb, and the hand can therefore fit inside with very little problem. However, even this is not sufficient on its own, and the reason I am making clear that you can have a spiritually lifeless and completely unappealing biblical church. Vital though it is to have the correct structure and format of church life, it is not of itself anything like enough. A glove, whilst being completely the correct shape, could nevertheless still be made of silk, or cast iron. It could be correct in ‘shape’ – that is, in structure and format – yet hard, unyielding and immoveable. You could quite easily have a group of believers who gather together on the basis of a mutual and completely correct understanding of what the Bible teaches about church structure and format, but who are, both as individuals and as a corporate church, nevertheless still completely missing the point: and that is the life, power and presence of Jesus lived out amongst them. If we were to take a certain amount of liberty with the well known saying about ‘an iron fist in a velvet glove’, then we might say that such a church, though fully biblical in its structure and format, would nevertheless be the equivalent of the velvet touch of the hand of the life of Jesus being pretty much completely constricted inside a hard and unyielding iron glove.
So let it be properly understood just what is, and is not, being said in this regard. If someone asked me what is best, a loving and spiritually alive unbiblical church, or a harsh, unloving, legalistically driven biblical one, I would unhesitatingly reply that it is the former. Yet that thinking is, ultimately, a false dichotomy. Why be limited to merely choosing between two such things when we can simply look to the Lord to enable us to form into loving, spiritually alive biblical churches? You might as well ask me whether I think you would do best to marry an unbeliever who is brilliant with children, or a believer who is not and who can’t stand them. My reply would be simple: Why not just trust the Lord and go all out for a spouse who loves the Lord and children, and who is good with them?
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